A key witness whose testimony backs up French charges that Tutsi guerrillas killed Rwanda's ex-president Juvenal Habyarimana, triggering the 1994 genocide, has retracted his claims in an interview.

Richard Mugenzi was a Rwandan army radio operator when Habyarimana's plane was downed on 6 April 1994. The event is widely seen as sparking the genocide in which Hutu extremists slaughtered some 800,000 people, most of them Tutsis.

Interception

In 2001, Mugenzi told French investigators he "personally intercepted" and transcribed a message from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Tutsi guerrilla movement congratulating one of its squads for carrying out the attack.

His testimony is central to the case of a French anti-terrorist judge who issued warrants in 2006 for nine aides to President Paul Kagame, the former RPF leader, accusing them of being behind Habyarimana's assassination.

Propaganda

But in an interview with Le Monde newspaper, Mugenzi said the radio message was in fact dictated to him by his Hutu bosses as anti-Tutsi propaganda.

Mugenzi told the newspaper that he was convinced "the attack on the plane had nothing to do with the RPF."

Quoted in Le Monde, french journalist Dupaquier acknowledged the possibility however that Mugenzi, who recently returned to live in Rwanda, had been pressured by Kigali into changing his statement.

Diplomatic tensions

Rwanda broke off diplomatic relations with France in the wake of the warrants against Kagame's aides. Kigali accuses Paris of having actively supported the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide.

But since France's President Nicolas Sarkozy's election in 2007 Paris has sought to mend ties with the central African nation.

Last November one of the nine suspects targeted by the French inquiry, Kagame's chief of protocol Rose Kabuye, was arrested in Frankfurt and extradited to France, where she was charged.

Kagame said at the time that her arrest and trial could help break the deadlock between the two countries. Following Kabuye's arrest, her defence team was given access to evidence against her, including Mugenzi's testimony.

A few days later, another central witness in the French case, former RPF soldier Josue Ruzibiza, retracted testimony that had incriminated Tutsi guerrillas in the ex-president's murder.

(Source: AFP)